Last week we looked at the thinking traps that can lead us astray and contribute towards our anxiety. This week we explore the healthy lifestyle changes we can make which serve to reduce our anxiety.

Lifestyle Choices to Reduce the Effects of Anxiety

Offer your anxiety understanding

The first critical step to counteract your anxiety is somewhat counter intuitive and comes from teachings in self-compassion. Surprisingly, in order to overcome anxiety and ‘win the war’ you must first accept its presence in your life and recognize it is your minds way of trying to protect you against a perceived threat or coming to any type of harm. Once you appreciate this you can have a greater level of compassion and understanding towards your anxiety rather than resisting it which often only causes your symptoms to increase. Remember, in psychology, what you resist, persists!

Exercise

Like most things, anxiety is profoundly affected by exercise. Just five minutes of continuous exercise has been found to reduce the effects of anxiety, so just think what half an hour could do. If you are averse to high impact exercise psychologist studies have found that a ten minute walk could be as effective as a forty-five minute workout and relieve symptoms for up to several hours. Furthermore, if you exercise regularly the effects of anxiety can reduce long term. To explore how to incorporate exercise into your life on a regular basis please read my article titled ‘New Year, New You’.

I’m really excited to reveal that next month’s hot topic is anxiety. Having suffered from anxiety myself I know just how debilitating can be. It’s important to remember that anxiety is different from mere worrying (which admittedly is awful too).

Whereas worry is considered by psychologists to be normal and tends to relate to something specific, for example, your performance on a test, anxiety is more generalized and all pervasive and is considered by psychologists to be more severe by nature.

If you tend to worry a lot please sign up to my mailing list to get your free downloadable eBook ‘Don’t worry, be happy’.

For those of you that are unsure as to whether you have experienced or are experiencing anxiety there will be a ‘How anxious are you?’ questionnaire as part of my linear posts in the first week of the series!